Currently, financial account providers, such as banks, credit card companies, merchants, lenders, and the like, offer incentives for potential customers to switch their financial accounts from an existing provider. Lower interest rates, reduced fees, overdraft forgiveness, and premium services are some examples of incentives that financial account providers may offer to lure customers from a competing provider.
While such offers may be beneficial to a potential customer, the mechanisms used by current providers to present the incentives lack tools that enable customers to understand and appreciate the value in switching between service providers. For example, while a financial account provider may offer account switching incentives to a potential customer by advertising lower interest rates for credit accounts (or higher rates for checking accounts), the customer is required to manually compare features and benefits between their existing accounts and the offered accounts to calculate their own savings. This may require the customer to review and analyze their account statements, adding up fees paid, interest earned and time spent going to and from the branch to make deposits, in order to calculate their monetary and time savings if the customer switched accounts. While some calculators are available to assist in this assessment, they still require consumers to pore over statements to figure out what to input into the calculator in the first place.
Moreover, consumers are left in the dark concerning the degree of difficulty and complexity involved in switching accounts. No processes exist that give transparency to the switching process based on a customer's unique situation (e.g. how many direct deposits they have, how many bill payees they have set up in their previous account and how many bills are automatically debited from their account) and rate the degree of difficulty so customers expectations are set if deciding to switch.
Thus, existing mechanisms are cumbersome, slow, and lack user-friendly feedback that enable a customer to quickly appreciate the benefits of switching a financial account to a new provider offering switching incentives.